Yes, immigration hurts working Americans

First: The story about immigration benefiting all (or almost all) native workers could be true. But that doesn’t mean it is true. Economists prove their claims about immigrant law by drawing regression curves that compare ratios between data sets based upon the number and the pay of immigrant and native workers. Have they drawn their data sets correctly? Did they choose the correct basis for comparison?

These technical decisions at the beginning of the calculation have huge impacts on the final conclusion at the end. Between 1990 and 2006, the wages of non-college-educated Americans declined. The less education the worker had, the steeper the decline. How much was immigration responsible? The data the economist chooses to look at will determine the answer.

Let’s go to the fine print, relying on a critique of Giovanni Peri’s work by George Borjas, of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Aggregate high-school dropout and high-school graduates together, and immigrant labor accounted for 13.2 percent of the increase in hours worked between 1990 and the onset of the Great Recession: big, but not cataclysmic. But if you take more care to compare like with like, you begin to see huge supply shocks. Among high-school dropouts only, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of the increase in hours worked between 1990 and 2006. Among high school dropouts in their 30s and 40s, immigrants accounted for over one-third of the increase in hours worked.